View original postsubject quote from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_American_Civil_War

"The war had its origin in the fractious issue of slavery, especially the extension of slavery into the western territories."

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

"I have never doubted what Virginia would do when the alternatives present themselves to her intelligent and gallant people, to choose between an association with her sisters and the dominion of a people, who have chosen their leader upon the single idea that the African is equal to the Anglo-Saxon, and with the purpose of placing our slaves on equality with ourselves and our friends of every condition! and if we of South Carolina have aided in your deliverance from tyranny and degradation, as you suppose, it will only the more assure us that we have performed our duty to ourselves and our sisters in taking the first decided step to preserve an inheritance left us by an ancestry whose spirit would forbid its being tarnished by assassins. We, of South Carolina, hope soon to great you in a Southern Confederacy, where white men shall rule our destinies, and from which we may transmit to our posterity the rights, privileges and honor left us by our ancestors."

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_in_the_American_Civil_War

these are just from wikipedia. as someone who professes to love history, i find it disingenuous that you would conveniently ignore the underlying hostilities caused by slavery, and specifically the enslavement of the Africans brought to America, which in turn caused the outbreak of the Civil War. if it wasn't about slavery, there are a whole lot of people on record as saying it absolutely was about slavery, and especially standing in opposition to Lincoln's plan to wind down slavery in the US.

... In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.—Robert E. Lee, to Mary Anna Lee, December 27, 1856 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Lee#Lee.27s_views_on_slavery

This [opinion] was the prevailing view among most religious people of Lee's class in the border states. They believed that slavery existed because God willed it and they thought it would end when God so ruled. The time and the means were not theirs to decide, conscious though they were of the ill-effects of Negro slavery on both races.

As a panel of historians emphasized in 2011, "while slavery and its various and multifaceted discontents were the primary cause of disunion, it was disunion itself that sparked the war."[3] States' rights was entirely a matter in regards to the protection of slavery. The issue of tariffs was so unimportant that the groups looking for some sort of compromise did not even consider it.[4] Other important factors were partisan politics, abolitionism, Southern nationalism, Northern nationalism, expansionism, economics and modernization in the Antebellum period.